Sunday, June 18, 2017

Your crossroads. Your choice.

About the Book

Title: Your crossroads. Your choice.

Author: EJ Apicello

Genre: Self-help

Welcome to my diary, my journey, as I tripped and
crawled through the darkest time in my life- when I witnessed people that
I held incredibly close to me shatter my very existence with their words and
actions. The things within this book spine are extremely raw and exceptionally
real. You and I are going to get very close, the details in this book, although
oddly general, are incredibly specific. Yes, I realize what I just said and as
you read my words you will see what I mean. As you silently gasp and mentally
bitch slap me, please be kind because my story is just that - my story. It is
not any more or less special than yours. In fact the only difference between
our stories are the choices we made at each of the crossroads in our lives. For
most of my life the choices I made were not based on my happiness but on
everyone else’s. This book describes what I have experienced in my journey to
finding my happiness and hopefully never letting it go. Sadly, it took me
thirty six years to find the strength I need to detoxify my life and self view
and find someone who is worthy of my awesomeness. Thirty six years to shatter
the negative foundation I had built shatter the ultimate representative I
created to hide behind and begin the process of building a new foundation. Only
this foundation will be built on strength, confidence and above all, happiness.
So take a minute or thirty and sit with my story for a while. You never know
what you might find out.

Author Bio

Welcome to my real, crazy, emotional, probably too
honest journey. I am an everyday girl in this everyday world trying to keep my
head above water and within the pages of this book you will learn about the
things that have broken me down and the steps I am taking to build back
up. You will see, my new friends, that this story is written in a unique,
general, conversational voice, which was my choice. I want you to be able to
picture yourself in my shoes, relate my trials and tribulations to yours and
see that you too can find your happiness. Even if you don’t realize this yet,
every single one of us possesses things inside of ourselves that we didn't know
were there. It took my life taking a crazy right turn and dumping me at the
lowest possible point before I could see the strength within myself. We are not
defined by what we do, we are defined by the choices we make. I decided when I
put pen to paper that I want my choices to start defining me as strong,
confident, secure and above all else, happy. So, who am I? How about I tell you
who I was - a self loathing shell of myself who put everyone else’s happiness
before my own. Herein lies my story to find that happiness and all of the ups
and downs along the way. See who I was and who I am trying to become and maybe,
somewhere in there, you will find out a little about yourself too.

2. find strength and confidence in the choices
they make so that they can find their happiness.

3.Your crossroads. Your choice

4.Every choice has an opposite
choice

5.choices sit at our own personal
crossroads, forcing us to embrace either the right or the wrong, the easy or
the hard, the light or the dark

6.Put yourself into my shoes
through my words

7.I chose early on to place the
pleasure and happiness of everyone else above my own, and it was killing me.

8.Put yourself into your past and
go through the decisions you have made, the experiences you have had at each of
your own crossroads. Did you put your happiness or the happiness of others
first when you made your decisions? If your happiness was secondary, why? What
reason did you sell yourself that sounded like it made sense at the time?

9.As one person, we cannot be expected to fix everything
and even more importantly we cannot be expected to follow every rule, to always
be perfect.

10.There
is not one single person on this earth who knows what is going to happen in the
future, or who knows every right decision that is to be made, yet I was wasting
my time worrying that the person should be me.

11.The
choices made at each of his crossroads, good or bad, right or wrong, caused him
to be who he is.

12.An
ultimate representative my new friends is a unique nightmare I created for
myself very early on in life to hide behind everyday, convinced that it was the
right choice

13.Remember,
opposite choices will always exist at each of your crossroads. To lose my
darkness is the equivalent of losing my light since one cannot exist without
the other.

14. despite all of the steps forward I have taken,
there are days I feel like I am still at the beginning. I still falter and lose
my way but the difference is that now I am in control. I choose each step I
take, each path I journey down with my eyes wide open.

15.Changing
who you are is difficult if not impossible, believe me, this whole book is
about my attempts to do that my whole life before realizing that who I am is
just fine. Here’s the hook: changing how you handle life is totally in your
control. Choosing happiness is up to you!

16.The
events of our life do not make us unique, rather it’s the choices we make at
the crossroads of those life events that truly define who we are.

17.I
know that saying “I am broken” could make me sound weak or not complete, but we
are all broken. It is what makes us human, unique in our own experiences.

18.This
idea of an unobtainable perfection is something we have drilled into our very
DNA as a self-preservation technique. If we are always striving for perfection,
then we don’t have to face our failures and shortcomings because they are not
our fault they are just a step towards becoming perfect.

19. we must learn to be happy in our present
moment before we can look towards the future

20.You
can’t be anything other than you, and the you in your present moment is just
who you are supposed to be.

21.As
you are sitting with your feelings, seeing how my words make you react, try and
do it without judgement or immediately attempting to fix or change whatever you
may be feeling.

22.If
you can begin to accept who you are it makes it easier for others to begin do
the same.

23. we are all products of our upbringing, and the
choices we have made at each of the crossroads in our lives

24. the key to handling mistakes or so-called
failures from your past is to take them, reflect on them, understand them, and
then use the knowledge you have gained to strengthen the choices you make at
future crossroads.

25.Remember
we can’t change who we are, that is a lesson in futility. We can only change
how we choose to react to what life throws at us

26. you are not special and neither am I. At least
not when it comes to the fucked-up shit we all have experienced in our past,
the wounds those experiences have left, and the crazy it has caused us to
become. For me to call those experiences special would give them strength and
power over me. It would allow them to firmly and vividly take root in my
memory, never letting me move on.

27. hope that my journey causes these past
experiences and self-diminishing thoughts to soften their sharp edges and melt
into the background of my memory where they belong

28. non-special part of us is that we are all, to
varying degrees, messed up from our past. Where our uniqueness and
individuality shine is in the way we choose to handle our darkness, if we
choose to handle it at all. We are all broken and we, myself included, need to
focus on accepting our entire selves as the first step toward discovering who
we are and what makes us happy.

29.There
is no purpose in continuing to lament about what is wrong—if you continue to
talk about a flat tire, will it magically fix itself? No, it’s up to you to
make the choice to fix it. This choice,
however simple it may seem, is what will set your future in motion again,
because if that choice isn’t made, just like that tire, you are stuck.

30. tough times happen no matter what, we need to
learn how to deal with them instead of trying to control life in the futile
hope that they won’t occur.

31.Comments
or judgments spoken in a direct sentence form does not constitute a genuine
piece of advice.

32. believe in living in the present moment,
appreciating the complexity or simplicity in the task you are doing and making
sure it is something that is going to make you happy

33.my
fingers are running downhill, desperately trying to catch up with the words
flowing from my mind

34.The
person I want to become, the happiness I am seeking is somewhere inside me

35. the present moment is where I want to be

36. I don’t need Ma man to find happiness, but I
choose to have one in my life because he has become part of my happiness

37.place
yourself in any thought or memory of a wedding you can access. Picture the
bride, people shuffling all around her in a hustling blur. Wipe off the makeup,
remove the poufy dress, and mess up the hair. That was how I thought I should
be represented in my wedding day memory.

38.I
thought he and my marriage were my future and subsequently my demise

39. growth is inevitable and when we embrace it we
truly can become happy

40. I threw my darkness on someone who could not
catch it.

41. What happens to us is not what makes us
unique. It’s the choices we make at the crossroads that arise from these life
events that define who we are. The choices are what we are in control of.

42.We
are only in control of how we react to our crossroads and the choices we make
at each one and the emotions we feel about those choices.

43.What
pieces will I dust off and take with me? What pieces will I choose to leave
behind?

44. If I choose to heal then I have to let go of
the uncontrollable and focus on what I do have control over, me

45. I can only control my own choice and therefore
my own happiness.

46.I
chose, which now I see was not the right thing, to push my uniqueness down and
show the parts of me that weren’t met with such scrutiny

47.I
chose, which now I see was not the right thing, to push my uniqueness down and
show the parts of me that weren’t met with such scrutiny

48.you
can’t control other people’s happiness. It comes from within themselves just as
yours comes from within you. All you can do is share your happiness. What they
do with the happiness you have shared with them is a choice only they can make

49.when
this radical idea was born, our marriage pretty much died.

50.If
you haven’t slapped your forehead or dropped your jaw in amazement at the
tangled, web I have managed to weave my life into by now, then you are a
complete sociopath. For real, stop reading this and instead use it as a weapon
to bludgeon your next murder victim since you obviously have no feelings! If
however, you have on several occasions thought, “This bitch is crazy, shit like
this only happens on TV!” well then you are a normal functioning human and
should proceed with the rest of my story.

51.I
again cannot believe the depths of my weakness and the desperation I must have
been experiencing to allow this one person to hold so much influence over my
choices, life, and happiness.

52.It’s
amazing how life deals you exactly what you need at the moment you need it

53. unless I am a little bit selfish and figure
out what will make me happy, I will be useless to anyone else

54.Why
live in the past when you can look forward to the future?

55. Eventually, the ultimate representative I had
been selling to everyone else began to take root as the truth for myself,
solidifying one more layer of lies that I hid behind

56.sex
wasn’t entirely the solution to the problem I was tying to solve. The people I
encountered helped each in their own way. Their stories, which will remain in
my memories, allowed me to peel back those hardened layers of my ultimate
representative.

57.Emotional
pain is also way worse because it is invisible.

58.Those
pesky opinions from everyone else are like termites. They munch and munch away
at your confidence and self-resolve until you are too weak and broken to do
anything else but let them take over.

59.you
possess the strength and confidence to face your crossroads and choices head
on. You deserve to find your happiness

60.It
took my life taking a crazy right turn and dumping me at the lowest possible
point before I could see my strength. You see, we are not defined by what we
do; we are defined by the choices we make.

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